Two
Templar knights were arrested in Scotland and put on trial in 1309 at
Edinburgh. During the course of their testimony, which was written down and
preserved by the clerics of the court, one of the knights testified about
the escape of the other Templars. The Preceptor was the highest ranking
Templar in Scotland.

"Being
asked concerning the other brothers in Scotland, he stated that John de
Hueflete was Preceptor of Blancradok, the chief house of the order in that
country, and that he and the other brethren, having heard of the arrest of
the Templars,
threw off their habits and fled, and that he had not since heard aught
concerning them." [1],[2]

When
the trial of the two Templars was completed, no guilt had been found against
them, so no sentence was passed and they were free to go. There is no record
of any other Scottish Templar being arrested. In other words, 100 percent of
the Templars in Scotland survived.

In
about 1340 Ludolph of Sudheim, a German priest on a pilgrimage to the Holy
Land, came upon two elderly men on the shores of the Dead Sea. He entered
into conversation with them and discovered that they were former Templars,
captured when the city of Acre had fallen to the Mamluks in May 1291, who
had since then been living in the mountains, cut off from all communication
with Latin Christendom. They had wives and children and had survived by
working in the sultan's service. They had no idea that the Order of the
Temple had been suppressed in 1312 and that the Grand Master had been burnt
to death as a relapsed heretic two years later. The men were from Burgundy
and Toulouse and, within a year, were repatriated, together with their
families. Despite the scandal of the suppression, they were honourably
received at the papal court, and were allowed to live out the remainder of
their existence in peace.[4]

These
two Templars were the almost forgotten remnants of what, barely a generation
before, had appeared to be one of the most powerful monastic orders in
Christendom. During the thirteenth century the Order may have had as many as
7,000 knights, sergeants and serving brothers, and priests, while its
associate members, pensioners, officials, and subjects numbered many times
that figure. By about 1300 it had built a network of at least 870 castles,
preceptories, and subsidiary houses, examples of which could be found in
almost every country in western Christendom.

The
extent of the Templar empire can be gauged from the fact that in 1318
pensions were being paid to former Templars in twenty-four French dioceses,
as well as in York, London, Canterbury, Dublin, Tournai, Liège, Camin,
Cologne, Magdeburg, Mainz, Castello, Asti, Milan, Bologna, Perugia, Naples,
and Trani, in Nicosia in Cyprus, and in the kingdoms of Aragon and Mallorca.[5]

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[3]
Barber, Malcolm The New Knighthood: A History of the Order of the Temple
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p.1-2.